USF project aims to ID slain crime victims

One is known only as "Marie," a teenage girl who was shoved into the path of an oncoming car on June 9, 1973.

No one knows the name of another, a woman found left in a trunk behind an oyster bar on Oct. 31, 1969. Nor of the man found shot to death in his hotel room on April 26, 1980.

What the trio has in common, aside from dying violently in St. Petersburg, is that they are buried in separate graves at the Memorial Park Cemetery in St. Petersburg. And next week, in a first-time, high-tech effort to identify them, their remains will be exhumed.

"It's something we have to do," said Brenda Stevenson, a civilian investigator with the St. Petersburg Police Department who works cold cases. "Hopefully, we'll be able to close some cases and get some families some closure."

On Friday, Erin Kimmerle, an anthropologist from the University of South Florida, and a group of USF students used ground-penetrating sonar equipment to help detect exactly where the bodies are.

After the exhumation, the medical examiner's office will send bone and tissue samples from the remains to an FBI lab so DNA profiles for the three can be created. The profiles will then be run against a national database of missing people's DNA to see if there are any matches.

There was no reason to exhume the bodies before, Stevenson said. The people died before DNA technology had developed enough to allow scientists to glean genetic fingerprints from bone or tissue samples. "DNA didn't exist back then," she said.

The missing-persons database itself wasn't operational until 2001.

Remains have been exhumed before on one or two occasions, but in those cases investigators had an idea who they were, said Bill Pellan, director of investigations for the medical examiner's office. Next week's efforts represent the first time remains will be exhumed without detectives having specific identifiers against which to compare them.

It could be the start of a trend.

One reason the remains will be exhumed is that the management at Memorial Park Cemetery, which is at 54th Avenue and 49th Street North, has agreed to disinter them at the cemetery's expense.

Pellan said authorities are also in contact with Royal Palm Cemetery, in south St. Petersburg, and it looks like it, too, will take part in a disinterment of a body there without charging anyone. Authorities also plan to talk with a cemetery in Pasco County, he said.

All told, the medical examiner's office has a list of 24 John and Jane Does who have turned up during the past 40 years, including the three at Memorial Park Cemetery, Pellan said. While some are buried in cemeteries, the remains of others are kept at the medical examiner's office.

Only three of the 24 died in the past 10 years, a testament to a combination of ever-improving technology and merged national databases, Pellan said.

One important resource is the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, - which actually contains two databases, one for unidentified remains and one for missing persons - plus search engines the general public can use to find a match.

In some of the three St. Petersburg cases, a killer has been brought to justice, or at least charged, St. Petersburg police said. Lawrence Edward Dorn was initially charged with manslaughter in the death of "Marie," though the charge was later dropped. And a man was arrested in the motel-room shooting.

Pellan said there's no guarantee DNA profiles will be gotten from the remains, especially in the older cases, because bodies degrade over time.

"We have to try and get a profile before it's too late," he said.

Even if no convictions result, Kimmerle said, identifying remains is important to families left in the dark as to the whereabouts of loved ones.

"The idea is that the families have a right to know what happened and they have the right to have the remains of their loved ones returned to them," Kimmerle said.

The exhumations will take place Wednesday.